Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Stanford University*
and
Reuben J. Thomas, The City College of New York Published in the American Sociological Review 77(4): 523-547
©2012 American Sociological Association

* Michael J. Rosenfeld, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford,
CA 94305. Email: [email protected]. Web: www.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe. This project
was generously supported by the National Science Foundation, grant SES-0751977, M.
Rosenfeld P.I., with additional funding from Stanford’s Institute for Research in the Social
Sciences and Stanford’s UPS endowment. I am grateful to Sara Bloch and Ron Nakao for their
help and collaboration. Kristen Harknett and Rachel Lindenberg provided helpful comments.
Prior versions of the paper were presented at the Population Association of America meetings in
Dallas in 2010, and at the Center for the Study of Demography and Ecology at the University of
Washington in 2010.
Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary

Abstract
This paper explores how the efficiency of Internet search is changing the way Americans
find romantic partners. We use a new data source, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together
survey. Results show that family and grade school have been steadily declining in their influence
over the dating market for 60 years. In the past 15 years, the rise of the Internet has partly

mid-century studies using marriage records found that a high percentage of urban marriage
licenses were given to couples who lived in the same neighborhood of the city (Kennedy 1943;
Bossard 1932).

1
Gale and Shapley originally imagined mate search as analogous to applying to college. The weakness of the
analogy is that the set of American colleges is relatively small and stable, and information about most colleges was
fairly easy to find even in the days before the Internet. Unlike the set of colleges, the set of potential mates is large,
membership in the set is regularly changing, and information about the great majority of potential mates cannot
easily be gathered.
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.2
In this paper we exploit unique features of a new nationally representative dataset to
analyze not only how Americans meet their romantic partners (which has been studied in the
past), but also how the patterns of meeting have changed over time, which has never been
previously studied. The first wave How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey fielded in 2009
(HCMST, see Rosenfeld and Thomas 2010) has a longitudinal component and also replicates the
wording of relevant questions from the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey (see
Laumann et al. 1994). We use the forward and backward comparisons to supplement a
retrospective history of how Americans met their partners. HCMST included open-ended and
closed-ended questions about how respondents met their current partner, which together allow a
more accurate picture of how couples met than has previously been available. Because HCMST
postdated the Internet revolution by more than a decade, the data offer a unique opportunity to
assess the impact of the Internet on the way Americans meet their romantic partners.
The fact that Americans use the Internet to meet romantic partners has been documented
before (Madden and Lenhart 2006; Sautter, Tippett and Morgan 2010), and is not in itself
surprising. The Internet has become almost ubiquitous for most Americans. We go beyond
previous analyses to explain which subgroups of Americans are more likely to meet their
partners online, and why. Specifically, we show that gays, lesbians, and middle aged
heterosexuals- three groups who inhabit thin markets for romantic partners- are particularly
likely to have found their partners online. Individuals are in a thin market for potential partners

Modern Internet search accesses data that can be sorted and searched by user-defined rather than
pre-defined categories, making search for anything uncommon dramatically more efficient.
At the time of the introduction of the Netscape and the Internet Explorer browsers in late
1994 and early 1995, respectively, hardly any U.S. households had internet access. By 2009,
about 67% of American households had Internet access (U.S. National Telecommunications and
Information Administration 2010). The rapid adoption of Internet technologies has led to much
debate about the social impacts of the new technologies. Because the Internet technologies are so
varied, and the social uses of the Internet are still evolving, it is too early to say what all the
social impacts of the Internet will be (Katz and Rice 2002). The social impacts of even specific
and narrow technologies are notoriously difficult to identify (Fischer 1985). It is difficult to find
any technology that has not been alleged to have had substantial social impacts. Much has been
made of the social impacts of not only the light bulb (Yzer and Southwell 2008) but also more
prosaic technologies such as the washing machine (Lynd and Lynd 1929 p.174) and the fax
machine (Light 2006).
Some early studies of Internet use suggested that time one spent online reduced face-to-
face social interactions (Nie and Hillygus 2002) or increased rates of depression and isolation
(Kraut et al. 1998). The early findings of negative social impacts of time spent online have been
either overturned (Kraut et al. 2002) or broadly challenged (Katz and Rice 2002; Wang and
Wellman 2010).
Scholarly debate about the social impacts of the Internet has been hampered by a lack of
nationally representative data on how (or whether) people use the Internet to meet new friends or
partners. In this context we mean friends or partners whose relationships exist in the physical
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.5
rather than solely in the virtual world. While we acknowledge Putnam’s argument (2000 p.170)
that face-to-face relationships have important advantages over ‘virtual’ relationships, we also
demonstrate that relationships can start in the virtual world and be transplanted to the ‘real’ or
face-to-face world, a phenomenon that has previously been demonstrated primarily with
convenience samples of individuals who are active online (Parks and Roberts 1998; Kendall
2002; but see also Madden and Lenhart 2006).
In studying whether Internet access helped unemployed Americans find jobs, Fountain

scholars have argued that there were so few interracial unions and so few same-sex unions in the
past (Rosenfeld 2007), but the earlier scholarship was limited to indirect measures of family
influence. We measure family’s direct influence over mate selection outcomes in the US for the
first time.
The rise of individual search and choice in Internet dating does not imply that all forms of
segregation (previously promoted by family and by neighborhood geography) in the mating
markets will disappear. The Internet has forms of racial segregation of its own (Hargittai 2008),
and we know from the literature on online dating that preferences exist for mates and partners
that share the respondent’s race and religion (Hitch, Hortaçsu and Ariely 2010; Robnett and
Feliciano 2011). Furthermore, the great variety of political vantage points and cultures available

2
Castells (2000) has noted that, paradoxically, the great centers of Internet technology are highly geographically
concentrated in areas such as Silicon Valley, California, because the face-to-face networks are crucial for the cross
fertilization of ideas.
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.7
online allows people to find voices that most closely mimic their own (Adamic and Glance
2005), which can serve to reinforce biases and create cyberbalkanization. Hypotheses:
We begin with an observation about a fundamental aspect of the Internet:
Axiom: Internet search for romantic partners is potentially more efficient than pre-
Internet search.
Searching the personal advertisements in the pre-Internet era meant thumbing through the
newspaper classified section by hand. Print advertisements could only be examined one issue at a
time. Perhaps that is why only 4 out of 3,009 couples in the dataset reported meeting through the
newspaper classifieds (even though a majority of the sample met before the Internet era). In
contrast to the inefficiencies of searching paper documents, online search makes the archive of
old issues just as accessible as the current issue. Online, it is as easy to search across a million

partner.

Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.9
Conversely, scholars of the Internet who take a positive or even a utopian view of the
Internet’s social influence have argued that the Internet would make ascriptive personal
characteristics such as race, and family background characteristics such as religion and social
class less important (Barlow 1996), therefore:
Hypothesis 4: Respondents who meet their partners online are more likely to have
partners of different race, religion, or social class origin.

If the efficiency of search is the main advantage of finding partners online, then we
should expect to find that individuals who are looking for a type of partner that is harder to find
will be most likely find that partner online, therefore:
Hypothesis 5: The efficiencies of Internet search for romantic partners should be
especially important to individuals who are in a thin market for romantic partners.
An analogy to Hypothesis 4 is what Anderson (2006) refers to as the “long tail” of
Internet marketing. Brick and mortar stores only have room for the most popular items, which is
why esoteric items were difficult to find in the pre-Internet era. In the Internet era it became as
easy to find information about low-selling esoteric items as about popular items, and as a result
of the Internet, esoteric and niche items more readily found their markets.
If Internet search has indeed increased the efficiency for romantic partner search, we
would expect to find Americans with Internet access at home would be more likely to have a
romantic partner.
Hypothesis 6: The partnership rate will be higher for individuals who have Internet
access at home, all else being equal.

Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.10
Finally, as Internet access becomes more prevalent in American households, the
partnership rate for Americans should increase. That is, Internet access should lead to greater
overall efficiency in the dating market, and greater efficiency in the dating market should lead to

(participation rate 32.6%), and the respondents’ completion of the initial demographic survey
(56.8% completion), the composite overall response rate is a much lower .326*.568*.71= 13%
(Callegaro and DiSogra 2008). The very substantial issue of attrition bias can be controlled,
however, because KN gathers information from subjects at each survey stage (Couper 2000).
Among the 3,009 partnered respondents who participated in HCMST wave I, 2,520 or 84%
completed the first follow-up survey one year later. The follow-up survey was brief, and was
mainly used to ascertain whether the couples identified in wave I were still together.
Respondents who previously had answered “yes” to the question “Are you yourself gay,
lesbian, or bisexual?” were oversampled for the HCMST survey. Of the 3,009 partnered adults in
the survey, 474 had a same-sex partner.
“How did you meet” is a simple sounding question that turns out to be quite difficult
because of the ambiguity of ‘how’ with respect to where, when, and with whom. In in-depth
interviews that preceded the main survey, we discovered that people have stories, usually well
rehearsed and oft-repeated, about how they met their spouse or partner, but may not be able to
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.12
pigeon hole those stories into pre-defined categories. In addition, the number of possible venues
where couples meet, and the types of different intermediaries are too numerous for a closed
ended question to effectively cover all the possibilities. For this reason HCMST gathered the
stories of how respondents met their spouse or partner in an open ended text box (average
response length was 342 characters), as well as respondent answers to closed-ended questions.
The data from different kinds of overlapping questions allows for inconsistent responses to be
corrected in the analysis.

[Table 1 here]

The Results
Table 1 shows weighted summary statistics for the HCMST survey wave I, by couple
type. Compared to the American Community Survey (ACS) of 2008 (Ruggles et al. 2010), the
HCMST has higher rates of interraciality (7.2% for married heterosexuals compared to 3.6% in
the ACS). The higher rate of interraciality in HCMST is mainly due to the fact that the HCMST

meeting was brokered by friends rose from about 21% in 1940 to almost 40% in 1990, before
going into decline and dipping below 30% for the most recently formed couples. The pattern of
heterosexual couples meeting through or as coworkers is similar to the pattern of meeting
through friends (though coworkers have always been less influential than friends), with a steady
rise from 1940 and a peak around 1990 (at about 20%), followed by a steep decline after 1990.
According to Figure 1, several of the most traditional ways of meeting heterosexual
partners had monotonic declines from 1940 to 2009. Meeting through family was actually the
most common way that elderly respondents who met almost 70 years prior to the survey in 2009
recalled meeting (though the sample size of couples who met prior to 1950 is only 66). By the
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.14
early 1940s family had already been overtaken by friends as the primary way male-female
couples met. The steady decline of family as a broker in relationship formation in the US has
continued over 7 decades, declining from 25% of all heterosexual couples who met in 1940 to
less than 10% of heterosexual couples who first met in 2007-2009. The decline of family of
origin as a relationship broker in the late 20th century U.S. is consistent with the reported decline
of parental control over young adults for the same historical period (Rosenfeld 2007). Along
with the steady decline of family of origin as a relationship broker, primary and secondary school
declined monotonically as a first meeting place for couples that eventually become romantically
involved, from 21% of relationships around 1940 to less than 5% most recently.
As family and grade school have become less influential in the mate selection process of
heterosexuals in the U.S., so too have residential neighborhoods and the church declined as well
in their influence over the market for romantic partners. The declines of neighborhood and
church are not as monotonic as the declines for family and grade school. From about 1960 to
1990, Figure 1 shows that neighborhood and church had a roughly steady influence over how
heterosexual couples met, with about 10% of heterosexual couples meeting as neighbors and
about 7% meeting in or through houses of worship. After 2000, neighborhood and church went
in to steep decline along with most of the other traditional ways of meeting romantic partners.
The post-1995 declines visible in Figure 1 for heterosexual couples in meeting through friends,
meeting through coworkers, meeting through family, meeting in school, meeting in the
neighborhood, and meeting in or through church are all statistically significant declines.

Might the KN survey, because it is an online survey, over-estimate the Internet’s role in finding a partner? The
answer is possibly yes, but probably not by very much. We estimate a lower bound for the percentage of Americans
who met their partners online by assuming that individuals without Internet access at home when they joined the KN
panel would not have used the Internet to meet their partner. These values (appendix tables available from the
authors) are lower, but only modestly lower, because the individuals who had their own Internet access were much
more likely to find partners online. For instance, for respondents who met their partner in the last two years, the
percentage who met online is reduced from 21.5% to 17.3% (for heterosexual couples) and from 61% to 54% (for
same-sex couples).
5
Figure 1 shows a small bump in the percentage of heterosexual couples who met online in the early 1980s. This
bump corresponds to two respondents. These two respondents first met their partners in the 1980s without the
assistance of the Internet, and then used the Internet to reconnect later.
6
Match.com's study, (Chadwick Martin Bailey 2010), estimate that 17% of U.S. couples married in the last 3 years
met through an online dating website. eHarmony's study, by Harris Interactive (2009), estimates that 18.52% of new
marriages in 2008-09 met online.
7
Most of the increase in bars and restaurants and other public entertainment places is secondary to the growth of the
Internet; as couples who first meet online need a safe place to have a first face-to-face meeting.
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.16
couples who met online, and Hypothesis 2 predicted an Internet era decline in the traditional
ways of meeting; both predictions find support in Figure 1.
It is important to note that the categories in Figure 1 are not mutually exclusive. Every
relevant category was coded from the respondents’ stories. If the Internet were merely
reinforcing existing ways of finding partners, we would expect to find the Internet rising but we
would expect other previously stable ways of meeting (through friends, in college, in the
workplace) to remain unchanged. The fact that nearly all other ways of meeting have been in
decline during the Internet era suggests that the Internet is displacing rather than simply
complementing the traditional ways of meeting a partner.
Ninety-six percent of the couples in HCMST are either married or are unmarried couples

gay men than for lesbians; 26.7% of the gay men in HCMST met their male partner at a bar or
restaurant, compared to only 11.4% of lesbians who met their partner in a bar or restaurant.
Because the gender gap is small and insignificant for most ways of meeting, we combine
respondents by gender in Figure 1, and report the few gender differences in a separate table
(available from the authors).
The most striking difference between the way same-sex couples meet and the way
heterosexual couples meet is the dominance of the Internet among same-sex couples who met
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.18
after 2000, with more than 60% of same-sex couples meeting online in 2008 and 2009. Meeting
online has not only become the predominant way that same-sex couples in the U.S. meet, but
meeting online is now dramatically more common among same-sex couples than any way of
meeting has ever been for heterosexual or same-sex couples in the past. To an even greater
extent than for heterosexual couples, the Internet seems to be displacing all other ways of
meeting for same-sex couples.
The rise of the Internet as a virtual community with its own rules (Correll 1995), outside
of traditional family supervision and the historical constraints of geographic propinquity
(Wellman 2001) constitutes a special benefit for certain individuals. The efficiencies of Internet
searching are especially important for individuals searching for something uncommon. Same-sex
couples make up less than 2% of all couples in the US, and outside the big cities the percentage
would be substantially lower (Gates and Ost 2004); gays and lesbians are nearly always in thin
dating markets. The especially high rate at which same-sex couples meet online supports our
Hypothesis 5, that people in thin dating markets should be especially likely to meet online.
In addition to being dramatically more likely to meet online, same-sex couples have
always been dramatically less likely than heterosexual couples to meet through family, or to find
their partners in primary or secondary school. The number of same-sex couples who meet
through family or through primary or secondary school has never been as high as 5%, whereas
17% of heterosexual couples met through family in 1985, and as many as 25% of heterosexual
couples met through family in the 1940s. Social and geographic distance from the family of
origin has long been theorized as one of the fundamental factors in same-sex couple formation
(Bérubé 1990; Weston 1991).

year breakup rate for couples who met online was slightly below average, compared to other
couples who met during the 2000-2009 period. Couples that had been together longer, especially
couples who were married and coresident, were much less likely to break up in the one year
interval between wave I and wave II, which is why the couple breakup rate for couples who met
in 2000-2009 is substantially higher than the couple breakup rate for couples who had been
together longer. In Table 3 the raw odds ratios are a function of the weighted breakup rates
directly, and the adjusted odds ratios are each derived from separate logistic regressions
controlling for marital status at wave I, coresidence at wave I, respondent race, respondent
religion, the presence of children in the respondent’s household at wave I, and length of
respondent’s relationship with their partner.
According to Table 3, couples who met through friends had slightly higher than average
breakup rates (9.6% broken up after one year, compared to 8.1% for couples who did not meet
through friends). The greater breakup rate of couples who met through friends becomes
statistically significant when potential confounding factors are controlled for.
As was the case with relationship quality, most of the differences in couple dissolution
rates described in Table 3 are not consistent with a couple dissolution bias explanation of
changing ways Americans meet their partners shown in Figure One. Only the last two categories,
i.e. met in primary or secondary school, and met in church, have substantially lower couple
dissolution rates that could partly explain their greater prevalence among heterosexual couples
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.21
who met further in the past in Figure One. Though the differences in one year breakup rates are
mostly small and insignificant, even a small difference in the annual break-up rate could create
substantial differences over decades.

[Table 4 Here]

Table 4 presents a further effort to assess whether the way couples meet has changed over
time. Table 4 compares weighted nationally representative data from question 33 of wave I of the
2009 HCMST to the results from an identically worded question (also weighted and nationally
representative) from the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS). Column 1

Hypothesis 3, based on prior literature, predicted that the intermediation of families would be
associated with more traditional types of couples. Figure 1 already demonstrated that same-sex
couples were substantially less likely to meet through family intermediation. Table 5 shows that
18.2% of all heterosexual couples in the U.S. met at least in part through the intermediation of
some member of the respondent’s family or their partner’s family, compared to only 3.5% of
same-sex couples who met through family intermediation. The odds ratio for the difference in
Rosenfeld and Thomas, Searching for a Mate P.23
meeting through family is 0.16, meaning the odds of having met through family are about one
sixth as high for same-sex couples as for heterosexual couples, and the odds ratio remains
significantly less than one after respondent age and couple longevity are controlled for.
As the literature and Hypothesis 3 predicted, interracial and interreligious couples are
also both less likely to have met through family intermediation, though family suppresses
interracial and interreligious unions less dramatically than family suppresses same-sex unions.
For interracial couples, the odds of having met through family were 0.56 times as high as for
same-race couples, and for interreligious couples (most of whom are unions of persons raised as
Protestants with partners raised as Catholics) the odds of meeting through family were 0.77 times
as high as for couples in which both partners were raised in the same religion. The family’s
negative effect on interreligious and interracial couple formation remains significant after
respondent age and couple longevity are controlled for.
Meeting through family connections is associated with a particularly traditional type of
couple formation, specifically couples that are heterosexual, and couples that are uniform by race
and religion, but Table 5 shows that meeting through family is not significantly associated with
class homophily for romantic couples. Neither the couple’s educational gap nor the educational
gap of their mothers, nor the age gap between partners is significantly lower for couples who met
through family.
Whereas the family is an institution that promotes the formation of traditional types of
unions, couples who meet online tend to be less traditional in several important respects. First, as
we have already shown, meeting online is much more common among same-sex couples than
among heterosexual couples, and Table 5 shows that the higher rate of online meeting for same-
sex couples (41% of same-sex couples formed in the past 10 years met online compared to 17%